In the telecommunications industry, fiber-to-the-curb technology serves as the cornerstone for offering expanded and new information and entertainment capabilities to homes and businesses. Fiber-to-the curb technology is part of the continuing migration of optical fiber further and further into the communications loop that connects service providers and users. This technology brings with it capabilities and economies of scales that have not been possible before.
In a fiber-to-the-curb system, for signal communication and terminal control purposes, it is necessary to know the logical address of the Home Terminal Unit (HTU) that is communicating with a telecommunications network. This type of data is communicated in real time and is essentially independent of the HTU's physical location. In other words, as long as the network can identify the logical address of the HTU, there is no need to know from which home or business the HTU is communicating. For network service billing purposes, however, to know from which home the HTU is communicating is very important. While there are many protocols for addressing multiple terminals in a network, such as the HDLC and Ethernet protocols, no known protocol easily identifies the HTU's physical location. In fact, no reliable method or system exists that provides a method for determining the physical location of the terminal.
The state-of-the-art approach is to make handwritten or recorded reference lists of the location of the HTUs. The problems associated with cross-reference lists are human errors that often arise in manually recording information as well as the fact that such lists easily become outdated. Since a customer's bill is generated based on this information, however, it is important that it be accurate. Therefore, there is a need for a method for accurately determining the HTU's physical location as it communicates with the network is necessary.
An important consideration for any method or system that determines from which house the HTU communicates is to accommodate self-initialization. That is, such a method or system must make it so that a person does not need to tell the system in which house the HTU is located. Satisfying this need permits system changes to occur, such as moving an HTU from one house to another without losing track of the HTU's physical location. One way to meet this requirement might be to have a separate serial link from each optical network unit (ONU) of the fiber-to-the-curb system to each house that it serves. In this way, the ONU could easily identify the home from which it receives a communication signal. This method, unfortunately, has the drawback of adding circuitry to the ONU. The result is a more expensive more complex circuit. There is a need, therefore, for a method and system that fully avoids this complication.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a method and system for determining the physical location of an HTU by determining that the coaxial cable that connects the HTU at the physical location to the network carries a communication signal.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a method and system that identifies the physical location of an HTU by detecting that a coaxial cable between the HTU and associated ONU carries a carrier frequency signal. The method and system generate a detection signal in response to the carrier frequency signal to report the presence of the carrier frequency signal and communicates the detection signal to registering circuitry. Thus, by knowing the physical location to which the coaxial cable connects, it is possible to determine the physical location of the HTU that communicates the carrier frequency signal. The registering circuitry may then send a signal to the ONU for generating a telecommunications signal that includes the physical location of the HTU.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and system that determines not only an HTU's logical address, but also the HTU's physical location each time the HTU communicates with the telecommunications network.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a method and system that does not rely upon human intervention or record keeping to determine the physical location of the HTU from which the requests for communications services originate.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system for determining the physical location of an HTU that is low in cost to manufacture and implement, easy to maintain, and highly reliable.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide a method and system for determining the physical location of an HTU that may accommodate growth of the number of HTUs at the same physical location without requiring changes to the existing circuitry.